THAE CHAUNG, Myanmar (Reuters) – In this teeming camp for displaced Rohingya Muslims in western Myanmar, it’s easy to overlook the internet huts. The raw emotion they generate is much harder to ignore.

The huts have bamboo walls, thatched roofs and – most importantly – dusty laptop computers that allow Rohingya to reestablish contact with relatives who have left on boats for Thailand and Malaysia. The internet connection comes via cellphones jammed into the cobweb-strewn rafters.

Smoke from the camp’s cooking fires seeps in through the flimsy walls. Sound drifts out just as easily, obliging callers to share their personal dramas with everyone nearby.

What emerges is an intimate portrait of the Rohingya, a mostly stateless people living in often grim conditions in Myanmar, where many consider them illegal immigrants. The huts also provide an insight into the human traffickers who profit from the boat-people and the families they leave behind.

Today, there is joy: Fatima, 56, is blessing her son’s choice of bride. Connected via a Skype-like app, he sits in an internet cafe in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, where he works as a cleaner.

“Of course you must marry her, if her skin is fair,” Fatima tells him. Her son promises to introduce his sweetheart in a later call.

Other exchanges are tragic or sinister.

Many people arrive with scraps of paper with a cellphone number with a Malaysian country code. These belong to the traffickers who each year ferry thousands of Rohingya to Thailand, where they are routinely held for ransom in remote camps near the border with Malaysia.

Freedom costs $1,200 to $1,800 – a fortune for most Rohingya living on a dollar or two a day.

A trafficker is demanding $1,400 to release Rahana’s 12-year-old son. Rahana, who like many Rohingya women goes by a single name, has already sent $1,100, but the trafficker wants the balance.

At least she is allowed to talk briefly with her son. Usually, after an initial “proof of life” call, traffickers do not let relatives speak until paid in full.

A man answers the Malaysian number Rahana calls. “Let me speak to my son,” she tells him. A few seconds pass. Then a small voice says, “Mum?”

Rahana’s eyes fills with tears and her jaw trembles. She quickly composes herself.

“I will send the money,” she tells the boy. “Then they will let you go.” After the call, Rahana is dazed and fretful. “My son told me he was sick,” she says. “Whenever he eats, he vomits.”

“THEY TRUST ME”

Thae Chaung was a fishing village until 2012, when ethnic Rakhine Buddhists drove thousands of Rohingya from the nearby city of Sittwe. Religious violence in Rakhine State that year killed at least 200 people and left 140,000 homeless.

Today, Thae Chaung is a grimy, overcrowded camp. For most residents, a boat to Thailand is the only way out.

All those arrivals and departures presented Rohingya merchant Kyaw Thein, 29, with an opportunity.

Until 2012, he sold ice and gasoline to village fishermen. Now he runs a busy internet hut, charging 100 Myanmar kyat (10 cents) per minute for an overseas call on one of three battered laptops that are in almost constant use.

He provides other services too.

Rohingya working overseas routinely send money to relatives back home. This can be wired to the Sittwe bank account of a Rakhine middleman, who brings the cash to Kyaw Thein. He then gives it to the relatives – minus his 1.5 percent commission.

His windowless shack is also the conduit for thousands of dollars in ransom money.

Relatives entrust Kyaw Thein with bricks of kyat that he delivers to a Rohingya middleman in a nearby village. He says he does not charge for this service or deal directly with the traffickers. “They trust me,” he says, “but I don’t trust them.”

In the past, Kyaw Thein says, Rohingya had to pay hundreds of dollars to board Malaysia-bound boats. Now, they pay only a few dollars to be ferried to large ships moored far offshore.

Their onward voyage is free – because traffickers know they can extort much higher sums by detaining these boat people once they arrive in Thailand or Malaysia.

Brokers roam the Rohingya camps dotted along the Rakhine coastline, says Kyaw Thein, and get a “finder’s fee” from traffickers for each passenger they deliver.

Abdul Kadar blames these brokers for luring away his 14-year-old daughter. She left home one morning to visit a neighbor and never came back.

She is now in a camp in Thailand or Malaysia. The traffickers want $1,500 that Abdul Kadar, a whippet-thin rickshaw driver, cannot pay.

“They told me they would kick her off the top of a mountain,” he says.

Abdul Kadar told them to find a man who wants to marry her, then ask him to pay the ransom. He knows he is effectively giving them permission to sell his daughter.

THAE CHAUNG, Myanmar (Reuters) – Myanmar’s decision to revoke temporary identification cards for minorities is raising tensions among its 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims, who have effectively been disenfranchised just days after parliament approved a law affirming their right to vote in a referendum.

Last week, the government of the Buddhist-majority nation announced that the temporary identification, known as white cards, would be revoked on May 31.

The people who hold them are mostly Rohingya, a much resented minority in Myanmar, where many people consider them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

In Thae Chaung, a squalid fishing village in western Myanmar that has become a settlement for thousands of Rohingya, the decision was still to fully sink in, but was being met with a mixture of defiance, mistrust and resignation.

“If the government wants to take my white card, what can I do?” said Minara, 23, a housewife who gave only one name. “I’ll just have to give it to them.”

Mohammad Ayub, 28, said he would only surrender his white card if granted the same citizenship rights enjoyed by “all other ethnic minorities.” He doubted this would ever happen.

“I don’t trust the government,” said Ayub, who like many men in Thae Chaung is jobless.

The village is a 15-minute drive from Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state, where most of the country’s Rohingya live.

Violence between Rohingya and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in 2012 killed at least 200 people and made 140,000 homeless, mostly Rohingya.

Experts warned the hostility to the government plan could result in renewed violence.

“It is unlikely that white card holders in displacement camps will give these up voluntarily when it is not clear whether they will get any form of ID in return,” said Richard Horsey, a Yangon-based independent political analyst.

“Any attempts to enforce the order to surrender the cards could spark violence,” he said.

As well as the right to vote, white cards also entitle Rohingya to health and education services, but with certain restraints: their movements are severely restricted, and white card holders are barred from civil service jobs and some degree courses.

It also represents the link to political life for Myanmar’s minorities.

The country’s parliament voted earlier in the month to grant white card holders the vote in a possible constitutional referendum, paving the way for their participation in a general election later this year.

But Buddhists protested against the plan in Yangon, the biggest city in Myanmar, arguing many of the white-card holders were illegal aliens. Shortly after the protest, the government announced it would revoke the white cards.

“INCENDIARY”

Another 400,000 people outside of Rakhine State, mostly of Chinese and Indian descent, also hold white cards.

The government said on Feb. 11 the cards will be revoked in a “fair and transparent manner” by local officials, but didn’t explain what would replace them.

A pilot project to verify the citizenship of Rohingya and other Muslims has foundered on Rakhine objections and the government’s insistence that Rohingya identify themselves as “Bengali.”

Rohingya reject the term because it suggests they are illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh, when many have lived in Myanmar for generations.

Few Rohingya are Myanmar citizens, but most carry white cards, officially known as “temporary registration certificates.” This enabled them to vote in a 2010 general election, which was rigged by the military junta which then ruled Myanmar.

The Rohingya currently have five representatives in the national and state legislatures.

Disenfranchising white card holders in Rakhine State could be “incendiary,” the Brussels-based think tank Crisis Group warned in an Oct. 2014 report.

“It would be hard for (Rohingya) to avoid the conclusion that politics had failed them, which could prompt civil disobedience or even organized violence,” said the report.

Rakhine Buddhists also mistrust the government. On Sunday ,they staged a large protest in Sittwe, a city purged of its sizable Rohingya population after the 2012 violence.

Led by hundreds of Buddhist monks, the crowd waved placards reading “Never accept white card” and shouted “Anyone who allows foreigners to vote is our enemy.”

Thar Htun Oo, 75, a retired businessman who joined the protest, said he still didn’t believe white cards would be revoked. “The government is lying,” he said.

BANGKOK (Reuters) – A Myanmar Buddhist monk who called a U.N. human rights envoy a “whore” has violated his monastic code and could damage his religion, another prominent monk said on Tuesday, but he is unlikely to face censure.

Wirathu denounced Yanghee Lee, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, in a speech in Yangon on Friday, after she questioned draft laws that critics say discriminate against women and non-Buddhists.

“Just because you hold a position in the United Nations doesn’t make you an honourable woman. In our country, you are just a whore,” Wirathu told a cheering crowd of several hundred people in Yangon on Friday.

The monk also accused Lee of bias towards Rohingya Muslims, a stateless minority in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine.

“You can offer your arse to the kalars if you so wish but you are not selling off our Rakhine State,” he said. Kalars is a derogatory word for people of South Asian descent.

His speech was condemned by Thawbita, a leading member of the progressive Saffron Revolution Buddhist Monks Network in Mandalay, where Wirathu is also based.

“The words used that day are very sad and disappointing. It is an act that could hurt Buddhism very badly,” Thawbita told Reuters.

The network was formed by monks who helped lead the 2007 Saffron Revolution, a nationwide democracy uprising brutally crushed by the military. It is influential among educated Buddhists, but has little power.

A senior official at the Ministry of Religious Affairs told Reuters there were no plans to act against Wirathu.

“Of course, he has the right to express his opinion but he shouldn’t have used these terms,” said the official, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. “It can tarnish the image of our religion among those who don’t really understand its essence.”

Famed for his fiery speeches, Wirathu belongs to a radical anti-Islamic group whose monks preach that Muslims will one day overrun Myanmar. Buddhism is the country’s predominant religion and its monks are revered.

A quasi-civilian government now runs Myanmar after nearly half a century of hardline military rule. But its reforms have been marred by deadly religious clashes, with rights activists warning that hate speech could foment further violence.

Lee responded indirectly to Wirathu’s remarks in a statement released by her office on Monday.

“During my visit I was personally subjected to the kind of sexist intimidation that female human rights defenders experience when advocating on controversial issues,” she said.

MAUNGDAW, Myanmar (Reuters) – The fence stretches as far as the eye can see, its concrete pillars carrying coils of barbed wire across the mountains and marshes of western Myanmar.

Beyond the fence, on the far bank of the Naf River, is a ragged horizon of mangroves: Bangladesh. There, say Myanmar officials, lurks the armed militant group the fence was partly designed to keep out.

The Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) takes its name from the mostly stateless Muslim minority living in Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine State. Myanmar officials blame it for recent attacks here and believe it could foment more violence.

Most experts believe the RSO barely exists, with some saying it’s being used to further oppress the Rohingya, who often live under apartheid-like conditions with little or no access to schools, jobs or healthcare.

Tens of thousands of Rohingya have fled the region by boat since 2012, after violent clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists killed hundreds and displaced 140,000 people, mostly Rohingya.

The RSO is “essentially defunct as an armed organisation”, said the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, in an October report.

The RSO was set up in the early 1980s in the wake of a large-scale operation by the Myanmar military that drove about 200,000 Rohingya over the border into mainly Muslim Bangladesh.

Until the 1990s, a small number of militants trained at remote RSO bases in Bangladesh opposite Myanmar’s Maungdaw district.

Myanmar officials blame the RSO for a series of deadly incursions in northern Rakhine State, including an attack on May 17 that killed four members of Myanmar’s Border Guard Police.

Also jangling official nerves are threats against Myanmar by much more formidable militant groups.

In July, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi told followers to “take revenge” against Myanmar and other countries where Muslims were abused.

Then, in September, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahri announced the formation of an Indian branch that would “raise the flag of jihad” across the subcontinent, including Myanmar.

Within weeks, Myanmar’s deputy home affairs minister, Brigadier General Kyaw Zan Myint, told parliament an extra 39 billion kyat ($38 million) was needed for Rakhine security, most of it earmarked to extend the fence.

If approved, this would constitute a doubling of the state’s security budget of nearly 38 billion kyat.

VILLAGE CELLS

The military began building the fence in 1995 and it is now 77 km (48 miles) long, said Kyi San, the head of Maungdaw Township. Its more remote stretches are routinely damaged by wild elephants or corroded by salt water.

For Buddhist officials like Kyi San, the RSO poses an existential threat.

Statewide, Rakhine Buddhists outnumber Rohingya Muslims by two to one. But only six percent of Maungdaw’s 510,000 people are Rakhine or non-Muslim, Kyi San told Reuters during a rare visit to Maungdaw by a foreign reporter.

Kyi San feared RSO agents could radicalize this large Muslim community. “They take recruits back to Bangladesh for training,” he said. “They have cells in all the villages.”

The perceived threat extends beyond Rakhine State.

A roadside wanted poster near the capital Naypyitaw, in central Myanmar, features four RSO suspects, one of them an “explosives specialist”.

The poster didn’t say what they were wanted for, and Myanmar’s Special Branch, when contacted by Reuters, declined to elaborate for reasons of “national security”.

MILITANT “MYTH”

The Crisis Group report challenged the notion that the Rohingya were “ripe for radicalization”. The Rohingya see Western governments, not the global jihadi movement, as key supporters, and most of their religious leaders don’t preach violence, it said.

“Rohingya militancy is a myth,” said Bertil Lintner, a journalist and author who has covered Myanmar for 30 years. The RSO once had a small camp in the Bangladeshi region of Ukhia, which borders Maungdaw district, but never had a presence in Myanmar, he told Reuters.

Many of those who trained at Ukhia were not Rohingya but youths from other Bangladeshi militant outfits, he said. The RSO faded as the Bangladesh government cracked down on Islamist groups. “Today, it hardly exists,” he said.

Even though the RSO posed no real military threat, it provided a pretext to “squeeze and oppress Rohingya communities”, said Matthew Smith of Fortify Rights, a Bangkok-based rights group.

“The authorities are conducting violent spot checks and accusing villagers of involvement with RSO, dragging men off and forcing others to flee,” said Smith. “This has increased in recent months.”

Maungdaw chief Kyi San denied the authorities were oppressing Muslims. “We have a duty to protect the weaker Rakhine community,” he said.

MAUNGDAW, Myanmar (Reuters) – For years, tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslim boat people have fled this remote corner of western Myanmar for nearby countries. But another huge exodus has grabbed far fewer headlines.

Ethnic Rakhine Buddhists, bitter rivals of the Rohingya, are also leaving Rakhine State to seek jobs in Malaysia and Thailand. Small numbers of Rakhine are even following the same smuggling routes plied by the Rohingya and, like them, falling victim to human traffickers.

The exodus reflects a wider economic malaise. Myanmar’s quasi-civilian government has launched many reforms since taking power in 2011, but hasn’t created enough jobs.

“Go to Rakhine villages and you find only children and old people,” said Tun Maung, a prominent businessman in the Rakhine capital Sittwe. “The young people have already gone.”

The exodus of both Rohingya and Rakhine accelerated in 2012, after a year of violence between the two communities left hundreds dead and 140,000 homeless – mostly Rohingya.

Many displaced Rohingya now live in squalid camps along the Rakhine coast with easy access to ramshackle human-smuggling ships.

About 100,000 Rohingya boat people have left since the 2012 violence, said the Arakan Project, a Rohingya advocacy group.

The mass departure of Rakhine has been less noticeable because they usually travel by road and air, carrying passports unavailable to the mostly stateless Rohingya.

But Rakhine have also left in greater numbers since 2012, say Myanmar officials, after the unrest crippled a local economy neglected during nearly half a century of military dictatorship.

Millions of Burmese seek work abroad. About two million live in neighboring Thailand alone, said the International Labour Organisation. Many are unlikely to return until Myanmar’s economy improves.

“WE DON’T TRUST THEM”

The Rakhine exodus could worsen those economic woes and communal tensions.

In much of Rakhine state, home to 3.2 million people, the Rohingya are a persecuted minority outnumbered two to one by the Rakhine.

But in the Maungdaw area, on the state’s northern border with Bangladesh, those figures are reversed. Out of 510,000 people, only 30,000 are Rakhine or non-Muslims, township chief Kyi San told Reuters during a rare visit to Maungdaw by a foreign reporter.

As young people abandon their villages for jobs abroad, the Rakhine who remain feel besieged and vulnerable.

Hla Tun Oo, 30, has just returned to Maw Ya Waddy village after seven years working at a factory in Malaysia. In June 2012, while he was gone, the Rakhine village was burned to the ground by a Rohingya mob.

Maw Ya Waddy was rebuilt with the help of the Myanmar government and international aid agencies. It was also militarized.

Soldiers watch the fields from a hilltop. More soldiers are encamped at a Buddhist monastery between Maw Ya Waddy and the populous Rohingya villages along the coast.

Rakhine villages nearby have a permanent police presence, and all are linked by new, military-built roads which allow Rakhine to avoid Rohingya communities. An 11pm to 4am curfew remains in force.

“I was born here and love my land. I want to protect it,” said Hla Tun Oo, explaining why he returned.

But about 100 villagers, including Hla Tun Oo’s two brothers, work in Malaysia or elsewhere, leaving Maw Ya Waddy with only 20 or so men of working age.

Relations with Muslim neighbors remain strained. Rakhine farmers no longer hire them as laborers, as they did before 2012. “We don’t trust them anymore,” said village chief Maung Maung Thein.

Yet the Rakhine have much in common with the Rohingya.

Pyu Tote, 30, a Rakhine with no passport, paid a broker about $600 to smuggle him into Malaysia. Rohingya, who rarely have travel documents, also rely on brokers.

Pyu Tote was driven to southern Myanmar. He crossed into Thailand by boat, then trekked through hilly jungles into Malaysia, a route also plied by thousands of Rohingya.

Thirty people trekked with him. “Most were Rakhine,” said Pyu Tote, who worked at a Malaysian factory for a year.

Like Rohingya, the Rakhine are also vulnerable to exploitation. In August the International Organization for Migration arranged the return of 14 Rakhine men who were trafficked onto Thai fishing boats in Indonesian waters earlier this year.

The men were lured by the promise of well-paid jobs in Thailand.

LABOR ISN’T WORKING

Many Rakhine families depend on remittances from overseas. Hla Tun Oo sent home about $200 a month, and had saved another $20,000 after seven years in Malaysia.

But the departure of so many young Rakhine isn’t helping a local economy reeling from the 2012 bloodshed.

Rakhine State suffers from chronic poverty. Malnutrition is rife and its infrastructure is shoddy or non-existent, with factories few and far between.

After 2012, the price of vegetables and seafood, largely supplied by Rohingya, soared. So did the cost of labor. Sittwe businesses aren’t allowed to hire Rohingya, who were driven from the city and are now confined in distant camps ringed by police checkpoints.

“Violence and segregation have hit the economy hard,” said Richard Horsey, an independent Myanmar analyst. “Muslims are stuck in camps, unable to work, and the instability has made it harder to attract vital foreign investment.”

Economic growth would encourage Rakhine job-seekers to stay put. Or so hopes Tun Maung, the Sittwe businessman, who runs two restaurants and a hotel.

He has advertised for staff for six months. “Nobody has applied,” he said.

PHANG NGA Thailand (Reuters) – When Afsar Miae left his home near Teknaf in southern Bangladesh to look for work last month, he told his mother, “I’ll see you soon.” He said he expected to return that evening.

He never did.

When he reported for work at a house on the outskirts of Teknaf, a man there gave him a drink of water. Soon, his eyelids sagged and his head started spinning.

When he awoke, it was dark. He had lost all sense of time. Two Bangladeshi men then forced him and seven others onto a small boat and bound them.

“My hands were tied. My eyes were blindfolded,” said Miae, 20.

The boat sailed through the night until it reached a larger ship moored far offshore. Miae was thrown into its dark, crowded hold by armed guards. He and his fellow captives survived on scraps of food and dirty water, some of them for weeks.

The ship eventually sailed towards Thailand where, as Reuters reported last year, human-trafficking gangs hold thousands of boat people in brutal jungle camps until relatives pay ransoms to secure their release.

Testimonies from Bangladeshi and Rohingya survivors provide evidence of a shift in tactics in one of Asia’s busiest human-trafficking routes. In the past, evidence showed most people boarded smuggling boats voluntarily. Now people are being abducted or tricked and then taken to larger ships anchored in international waters just outside Bangladesh’s maritime boundary.

It’s unclear exactly how many people are being coerced onto the boats. But seven men interviewed by Reuters who said they were taken by force described being held until the boats filled up with hundreds of people in what are effectively floating prisons. Two of the men were taken to trafficking camps in Thailand.

“EATING LEAVES”

The experiences of these men recall the trans-Atlantic slave trade of centuries ago. Miae and four other men who were held on the same ship as him described being kept in near total darkness and being regularly whipped by guards. Two men from another boat said they were forced to sit in a squatting position and that the hatch to the hold was only opened to remove dead bodies.

Miae and 80 other men were abandoned, starving and dehydrated, on a remote island by their captors, who appear to have fled for fear their operation had been exposed, according to two local Thai officials who were involved in rescuing the men in Phang Nga, located just north of the popular tourist island of Phuket.

“Their conditions were beyond what a human should have to go through,” said Jadsada Thitimuta, an official in Phang Nga. “Some were sick and many were like skeletons. They were eating leaves.”

More than 130 suspected trafficking victims, mostly Bangladeshis but also stateless Rohingya Muslims from western Myanmar, have been found in Phang Nga since Oct. 11, according to Thailand’s Ministry of Social Development and Human Security. Prayoon Rattanasenee, the acting governor of Phang Nga province, said that interviews conducted by police, rights groups and his own people revealed that the victims were “brought by force. Many were drugged but we don’t know the exact number,” he told Reuters.

Evidence indicates that many of the boats appear to be from Thailand. The abducted men recalled ships with either Thai flags or Thai-speaking crews. In June, six people were killed and dozens injured when a mutiny broke out in Bangladeshi waters on what the Bangladesh Coast Guard described as a “Thai trawler” trafficking hundreds of men to Thailand.

“At night they enter our waters, take the people and again cross the boundary,” he said. “It is very difficult to identify those ships at sea.”

Ashiqe said the coast guard was intercepting smaller boats that were leaving Bangladeshi shores with people to feed the larger ships. A report in August by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said that in the first half of the year, Bangladeshi authorities reportedly arrested “over 700 people (including smugglers and crew) attempting to depart irregularly by sea from Bangladesh.”

The Royal Thai Navy, which patrols the coastline with the Marine Police Division, also said it was aware people were being held captive on ships off its coast. “The truth is they use fishing boats to transport people and the bottom of the boat becomes like a room to put the people [in], but it seems like a commercial fishing boat,” said Royal Thai Navy spokesman Rear Admiral Kan Deeubol.

The ship on which Miae was held set sail with its human cargo for Thai waters four days after he was taken aboard. Others interviewed by Reuters say they spent up to six weeks in the hold of the ship anchored in the Bay of Bengal. Fourteen armed guards were aboard, said Miae.

The men were forced to squat for much of their journey and sometimes had their hands and feet bound with rope or cloth. The guards routinely beat them with sticks or whipped them with rubber fan belts.

Food was a handful of rice a day, or nothing at all. What little drinking water they received was contaminated with sea water. “We tasted it in our hands and it was salty,” said Muhammed Ariful Islam, 22, a Bangladeshi fruit vendor who was on the same boat as Miae.

A NEW WEAPON

Miae, who left behind his wife and three children, said he was kidnapped. “I never thought I would leave Bangladesh,” he said, sitting in a government shelter in Phang Nga.

That’s a change. In the past, many impoverished Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladesh voluntarily boarded small, local fishing boats heading across the Bay of Bengal in the hope of reaching Muslim-majority Malaysia where they could find work. Smuggling, done initially with the consent of those involved, differs from trafficking, which involves entrapment, coercion and deceit.

Thai authorities say the existence of the boats in which people are being held against their will is a response to the more strenuous efforts they are making to combat trafficking. Police operations have led to the rescue of 200 to 300 trafficking victims in the past six months, said Police Major General Thatchai Pitaneelaboot, who is in charge of counter-trafficking operations for immigration police in southern Thailand.

“The traffickers have become more sophisticated and cautious, partly because of the Thai government policy to crack down,” he said.

The country’s military government says it is beefing up cooperation with neighbouring Malaysia and has registered more than one million illegal migrant workers to prevent them falling prey to traffickers. “That’s a big step,” said Sek Wannamethee, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Human rights groups say the growing use of force is because trafficking has become increasingly lucrative, not because of any new measures taken by Thailand. Competition between a rising number of people smugglers explains why they are resorting to kidnapping, said Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, a Rohingya advocacy group. “There are always five to eight boats waiting in the Bay of Bengal. And the brokers are desperate to fill them.”

Matthew Smith, the executive director of Fortify Rights, an organisation that documents human rights violations in Southeast Asia, said the size of the ships being used by traffickers has increased as business is thriving and the trafficking rings are able to operate largely with impunity.

THAILAND’S ROLE

A series of Reuters investigations in 2013 revealed the complicity of some Thai authorities in smuggling Rohingya and in deporting them back into the hands of human traffickers.

Thailand was downgraded in June to the lowest category in the U.S. State Department’s annual ranking of the world’s worst human-trafficking centers, putting it in the same category as North Korea and the Central African Republic. The same month, the Thai military vowed to “prevent and suppress human trafficking,” after having seized power from an elected government on May 22.

Five months later, jungle camps are still holding thousands of people in remote hills near the border with Malaysia, according to testimonies from two recent escapees and a human smuggler.

The men and women aboard the prison ships who reach Thailand are sold for $200 each to trafficking gangs, according to one of two Rohingya men interviewed by Reuters who recently escaped from the trafficking camps.

“The camps are running very smoothly,” the human smuggler, based in southern Thailand, told Reuters.

The smuggler, a long-time Rohingya resident of Thailand who spoke on condition of anonymity, estimated there were up to eight large camps holding 2,000 to 3,000 people at any one time.

The two men who recently escaped described the brutality in the camps. One of them told Reuters he witnessed camp guards gang-raping a woman.

Police Major General Thatchai describes a vast and complex trafficking network in which Bangladeshis and Rohingya kidnap and trade their own people with the help of nationals from Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia and Pakistan. “It’s transnational crime,” Thatchai said.

The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR confirmed the existence of “bigger fishing or cargo vessels” that carry up to 700 passengers across the Bay of Bengal to Thailand – a five- or six-day journey.

This time of year is rush hour for smugglers and traffickers. October marks the start of the four-month “sailing season,” the busiest time for smuggling and trafficking ships plying the Bay of Bengal.

The Thai Navy’s Kan said most of the boats and crews were from Thailand and that patrols against traffickers had been increased in the country’s territorial waters. But Kan said the bigger boats were operating beyond Thailand’s maritime boundaries, in international waters, and so the navy couldn’t move against them.

WHOSE JURISDICTION?

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to which Thailand is a signatory, each nation “shall take effective measures to prevent and punish the transport of slaves in ships authorized to fly its flag.” The Navy didn’t respond to queries on why it wasn’t acting against trafficking ships carrying the Thai flag outside its territorial waters.

Robert Beckman, the director of the Centre for International Law at the National University of Singapore, said the Thai Navy would have jurisdiction over a ship flying a Thai flag in international waters. Under UNCLOS it had a right, not an obligation, to act against someone suspected of engaging in the slave trade, he said. The “uncertain state of the law on these matters,” Beckman added, meant that navies and coast guards were “usually very reluctant to arrest persons outside their territorial waters, especially if they are on ships flying the flag of another state.”

Interviews with two Rohingya, who in early October escaped from a Thai trafficking camp, corroborate the testimonies of the Phang Nga victims. They also suggest the slave ships have been operating for some time.

Mohamad Nobir Noor, 27, says he was living in an impoverished Rohingya settlement in Bangladesh, near the border with Myanmar, when he was taken. One September evening last year, men with knives and sticks forced him onto a small boat that sailed all night to reach a larger vessel moored at sea.

It would eventually hold 550 people, Noor estimated.

They were guarded by 11 men with guns, he said. Most were Thai speakers but one was Rakhine, the majority Buddhist ethnic group in Rakhine State, where communal violence since 2012 has killed hundreds and left 140,000 homeless, most of them Rohingya.

About 30 of those being held were women. “There was one woman who was very beautiful,” said Noor. “The guards took her upstairs. When she came back she was crying and her clothes were wet. She didn’t say anything.”

Drinking water was so scarce that Noor said he drank his own urine to survive. When someone died, a small group of men was permitted to carry the body up on deck. A quick prayer was said and then the bodies were thrown into the water. “For the sharks,” Noor said.

ESCAPE AND MUTINY

Once, Noor tried to escape by jumping overboard during a trip to the toilet. The guards dragged him back in and gave him electric shocks with wires attached to the ship’s generator, he said.

Usually, most passengers were too physically weak or terrified to confront the guards. But, on at least one occasion, desperation trumped fear.

On the morning of June 11, the Bangladesh Coast Guard arrived off the coast of St. Martin’s Island, in Bangladesh waters, to record the bloody aftermath of a high-seas firefight that followed a mutiny aboard a Thai trafficking ship. Desperate for food and water, passengers had overwhelmed the crew. But another trafficking ship quickly arrived and its crew opened fire on the mutineers, said Lieutenant Commander Mahmud of the Bangladesh Coast Guard.

Six people were killed and 30 sustained bullet injuries. Among the injured were “two Thai crew members and one Myanmar human trafficker,” according to a Bangladesh Coast Guard statement.

A record 40,000 Rohingya passed through the Thai camps in 2013, Lewa of the Arakan Project said. They are held captive until relatives pay the ransom to traffickers to release them over the border in Malaysia, she said.

By early 2014, not just Rohingya but other nationalities were also ending up in the trafficking camps. In a series of raids earlier this year, Thai police found hundreds of Bangladeshis, as well as Uighur Muslims from China’s restive northwestern province of Xinjiang.

The camps were also the likely destination of the Bangladeshis rescued in Phang Nga. But something went wrong.

They were brought ashore at the remote island in Phang Nga under cover of darkness. Phang Nga official Jadsada says he believed they were about to be transferred by road to another location, but a tip-off to the authorities compelled their captors to flee.

Local officials have yet to account for another 190 passengers they believe came on the same boat as Miae and Islam from Bangladesh via the Bay of Bengal. Jadsada said they might already be trapped in trafficking camps.

BANGKOK (Reuters) – Thai police found scores of sick and exhausted boat people hiding on a remote island on Monday, and all but one of the 79 suspected human-trafficking victims were from Bangladesh, according to local officials.

The discovery brings to more than 130 the number of people found since Saturday in the province of Phang Nga to the north of the famous resort island of Phuket, officials said.

The first group discovered in a rubber plantation in Takua Pa district on Saturday comprised 38 men from Bangladesh and 15 Rohingya, a mostly stateless Muslim minority from western Myanmar.

They have been moved to a shelter in neighbouring Ranong province while their cases are investigated by Thai authorities ahead of possible repatriation.

The remainder were discovered on Monday, and of those 79, one was a Burmese national and the rest from Bangladesh. They are now in the local district office.

The high proportion of Bangladeshis cropping up on smuggling routes once plied mainly by Rohingya is consistent with what a leading Rohingya advocacy group says is an alarming rise in “forced departures” from Bangladesh.

“We are finding more and more cases like this,” said Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, which plots migration across the Bay of Bengal. “A huge chain of people is involved.”

She said the group had learned that brokers in Bangladesh were abducting men and boys, or luring them by false promises of work, then shipping them to Thailand and Malaysia.

There they are held in jungle camps or houses until relatives secure their release by paying the traffickers a ransom – usually several thousand dollars each.

Reuters has not spoken directly to the people found by Thai police over the last three days.

But according to an official who heads the group that interviewed them, some said they had been forced or tricked into boarding a boat for Thailand. Others may have left Bangladesh voluntarily in search of work overseas.

Officials in Bangladesh were not immediately available for comment.

Reuters reported last year how thousands of Rohingya were held and sometimes tortured by traffickers at jungle camps in southern Thailand until their families secured their release with ransoms of $2,000 or more.

TRADE STILL THRIVING

The discovery of the boat people, along with the detention of dozens more Rohingya last month, suggests that smuggling routes are still thriving in Thailand.

It has been downgraded to the lowest category in the U.S. State Department’s annual ranking of the world’s worst human-trafficking centres.

The State Department demoted Thailand to its “Tier 3″ category less than a month after the military seized power in a May coup, toppling the elected government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.

The army chief who led the coup, Prayuth Chan-ocha, quickly vowed to “prevent and suppress human trafficking,” although rights groups said his words had not yet translated into action.

In August, Prayuth was elected prime minister by a national assembly packed with serving or retired military officers. Neighbouring Malaysia was also downgraded in June to Tier 3, a level it shares with countries including North Korea and Syria.

“UNPRECEDENTED” NUMBER OF BANGLADESHIS

Regional trafficking routes have been forged by misery, cruelty and market forces.

Tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine State since 2012, when violent clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists killed hundreds and made about 140,000 homeless.

Most were Rohingya, who now often live in apartheid-like conditions with little or no access to jobs, schools or healthcare.

Some opt to leave with the help of brokers, who ferry them to smuggling boats moored off the coast of neighbouring Bangladesh. Rohingya think the boats are heading for Malaysia, but they are waylaid in Thailand and held for ransom at camps.

The same route is now routinely plied by Bangladeshis leaving their homeland in search of jobs.

In January, two police raids in southern Thailand freed 636 people, about a third of them Bangladeshis – an “unprecedented” number, said police.

LITTLE FOOD OR WATER

There are now so many boats and brokers vying for business in Bangladesh that some are resorting to abducting passengers to sell to traffickers in Thailand, the Arakan Project’s Lewa said.

“There are always five to eight boats waiting in the Bay of Bengal. And the brokers are desperate to fill them.”

The voyage across the Bay of Bengal to Thailand takes about five days, but many people were held for weeks before setting sail, with little food or water, while brokers found enough passengers, Lewa added.

The first group of 53 males was found on Saturday at a rubber plantation in Thailand’s Phang Nga province. Police arrested two Thai men on suspicion of transporting them.

“Some were fooled into thinking they could find work, some were coerced, some were threatened,” said Churin Kwanthong, head of the Phang Nga office of the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, which interviewed the group.

Four members of a second group of 72 were hospitalized, said Manit Phianthong, district chief of Takua Pa, the area of Phang Nga where they were found. Some looked as if they had not eaten for days or bore signs of abuse, he said.

“They took off their shirts to show marks of being beaten and tied up,” he said.

A separate group of seven men was discovered later on Monday in the same district, Manit added.

All three groups arrived in Thailand on a boat carrying about 200 people, said Manit. The authorities were scouring nearby islands for the remaining passengers, including women.

(Additional reporting by Kaweewit Kaewjinda in BANGKOK and Serajul Quadir in DHAKA; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

BATTAMBANG Cambodia (Reuters) – Brigadier General Sar Theth is the police chief of Battambang, a languid riverside town in western Cambodia. You could also call him the seven million dollar man.

On Sept. 19, Sar Theth’s officers tracked three Thai men in a pick-up truck as it passed through a remote border checkpoint from Thailand. When the truck stopped in the Cambodian district of Phnom Proek, the police pounced.

Inside, said Sar Theth, they found three cardboard boxes packed with $7.16 million in counterfeit hundred-dollar bills, the largest seizure of fake U.S. notes in Southeast Asia for about a decade and the biggest ever in Cambodia.

“If I close my eyes and touch it, I wouldn’t know it was fake,” he said, rubbing one of the seized notes between thumb and forefinger at Battambang police headquarters.

According to the U.S. Secret Service, whose agents investigate financial crime worldwide alongside their better-known role as presidential bodyguards, the huge bust points to a well-oiled and growing counterfeit operation in neighboring Thailand, where identical notes had previously been seized.

The alleged involvement of Thai military personnel – the three men arrested were serving or former officers of the Royal Thai Navy – could also embarrass Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha. A former general, Prayuth seized power in a May 22 military coup and has vowed to crack down on organized crime.

The men deny any wrongdoing, and the Thai navy said it was awaiting the conclusion of the investigation before deciding whether to take any action.

There is more than $1 trillion cash in global circulation, three-quarters of it outside the United States, according to the Secret Service. Tackling counterfeiting is key to maintaining the dollar’s credibility as the de facto world currency.

Less than a quarter of 1 percent of that $1 trillion – or about $2.5 billion – are fakes, said J. Kevin Traylor, a Secret Service agent based at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok.

“For the amount of currency out there, we have very little counterfeiting,” he told Reuters. “That’s why the dollar is trusted.”

By comparison, global losses from credit, debit and prepaid card fraud in 2012 totaled about $11.3 billion, according to the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter.

In South America, where narco-trafficking and counterfeiting often go hand in hand, big seizures of fake bills are not uncommon. In June, the Secret Service helped the Peruvian police arrest a suspected forger along with $4.5 million in fakes.

But such seizures are rare in Southeast Asia. The Cambodian bust could suggest both an upsurge in counterfeiting and better cooperation between the Secret Service and local police.

“TALENTED PEOPLE”

For the Secret Service, seizing notes is secondary to finding the printing presses and shutting them down.

The agency was created in 1865 as a branch of the U.S. Treasury to tackle rampant counterfeiting after the Civil War. It was another 36 years before its agents began protecting presidents, vice-presidents and other VIPs. Even today, most of its 3,200 special agents are busy investigating financial crime.

Traylor, who visited Battambang to inspect the $7.16 million haul in early October, said $1 million of the same “better-than-average” fakes had already been seized in Thailand. One person has been arrested in the Thai investigation.

“It is a note that is starting to be manufactured in larger quantities and our investigation points to Thailand as the origin,” he said. “We will continue our efforts to locate the plant.”

In 2013, with Secret Service help, Thai police made 67 arrests and seized $3.7 million in fake dollars. This year’s tally is already at 76 arrests and $5.6 million seized, not including the Cambodia bust.

The special inks and paper used by the U.S. Treasury to print dollar bills are tightly controlled. This has helped eradicate offset printing of fakes in the United States, where counterfeiters rely on methods such as inkjet printing or color photocopying.

But offset printing – in which the inked image is “offset” from a plate to a rubber blanket and then onto the paper – is still commonly used outside the United States to produce convincing fakes in greater volume. The process requires expensive inks and presses, as well as skilled artists.

“You need talented people to do this,” said Special Agent Traylor. And time: he reckoned $7.16 million could take perhaps two months to make.

IN THE NAVY

Royal Thai Navy spokesman Rear Admiral Kan Deeubol confirmed to Reuters that the three Thai men arrested on Sept. 19 were serving or former naval officers.

They were arrested after allegedly trying to change fake bills with a Cambodian contact who was actually a police informant, said Battambang police chief Sar Theth.

One of them – Chamras Pongsart, 52, a navy captain – was released after two days. “He was not involved,” said Sar Theth.

The two suspects still in custody are: Pramote Raisiri, 48, described in Thai media reports as a navy sub-lieutenant; and Kittithamet Meethekulsawat, 47, who Rear Admiral Kan said had resigned from the navy before the incident.

“They have not been suspended, because the investigation … is under way and we don’t know if they really committed wrongdoing,” said Kan.

The two Thai suspects have been charged with storing and transporting counterfeit currency, and face between five and 20 years in jail if found guilty. Their Cambodian lawyer, Chim Dara, told Reuters they denied any wrongdoing.

The criminal group making the fakes in Thailand is well-organized and linked to other scams, said Traylor. Ongoing investigations disrupted their operations and forced them “to try Cambodia as a new market”.

The dollar is widely used in Cambodia, and preferred to the domestic riel currency for high-value transactions such as paying rents and salaries.

Elsewhere in the world, criminals often use fake dollars to pay other criminals for narcotics, illegal timber or other contraband.

But Sar Theth said it was “impossible” to shift so many bills on Cambodia’s fake-savvy black market. Even farmers might find the notes suspect, he said, never mind banks or owners of currency-exchange booths.

Chi Kimcheav, 47, a money changer at Battambang market, said she relied on touch to detect fakes, which were often betrayed by poor quality paper. ”I’ve been doing this job for many years,” she said. “If someone gave me a fake, I’d know it.”

BANGKOK (Reuters) – When retired general Prayuth Chan-ocha lands in Myanmar on Thursday, his first overseas trip as Thailand’s new prime minister, he can expect a little love and a lot of understanding.

Prayuth, 60, led a military coup that toppled the elected government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on May 22. His junta has detained opponents, shut down websites and banned political gatherings. He was elected prime minister in August by a national assembly he helped appoint.

His Myanmar counterpart, President Thein Sein, is also a former general in his sixties with dubious democratic credentials. Thein Sein’s quasi-civilian government took power in 2011 after a rigged election, replacing nearly half a century of military dictatorship. His cabinet – like Prayuth’s – is dominated by serving or former military officers.

Yet both men are self-styled reformists who say they have a “roadmap” to lead their people towards happiness and prosperity.

Prayuth is due to meet Thein Sein in Naypyitaw, Myanmar’s capital, on Thursday, then with Thai investors in the commercial capital Yangon the following day.

Thailand is Myanmar’s second-largest trading partner and Prayuth’s visit is an opportunity to boost cooperation between and “discuss matters of regional interest”, said Thai government spokesman Yongyuth Mayalarp.

But some analysts said the trip would advance few economic goals and achieve little beyond giving the bluff Prayuth a much-needed statesmanlike veneer.

Mired in political turbulence for almost a decade, Thailand has allowed economic ties with its neighbor to decline in recent years, said Sean Turnell, an expert on Myanmar’s economy at Australia’s Macquarie University.

“You can’t help but feel the once tight economic relationship between Myanmar and Thailand has drifted, as other countries have come racing in,” said Turnell. He noted that only one of the nine foreign banks that recently got approval to operate in Myanmar was Thai – Bangkok Bank.

Spokesman Yongyuth said Prayuth’s trip would also “shore up confidence” in the multi-billion-dollar Dawei Special Economic Zone, a port and industrial hub planned in southern Myanmar.

The project was delayed after its leader, Italian-Thai Development Pcl, failed to secure private investment and agree on a power source for the zone. The Thai and Myanmar governments took control in 2013 and hope to develop it with Japanese help.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see some announcement of the on-going importance of Dawei,” said Turnell. “But I’d be very surprised to hear anything of substance.”

Prayuth has no plans to visit Dawei itself, said another spokesman. Nor will he meet opposition leader and democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent years as a prisoner of Myanmar’s military.

According to an official from Thein Sein’s office, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the president will raise the issue of two migrant workers from Myanmar arrested on Saturday on suspicion of murdering two British tourists on a Thai resort island last month.

Many people in Myanmar, commenting on social media, said they suspected their compatriots had been made scapegoats by Thai police. Police deny that.

IN YINGLUCK’S FOOTSTEPS

For Prayuth, Myanmar will be a warm-up for the Asia-Europe Meeting summit in Italy, where he joins dozens of heads of state on Oct. 16-17.

Compared with the globetrotting predecessor he overthrew, Prayuth has a lot of catching up to do. During her 33 months as prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra notched up visits to at least 40 countries.

Her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, a telecoms billionaire, was prime minister until 2006, when his government was also toppled by the military. Street protests followed, culminating in a military crackdown on Thaksin’s supporters in 2010.

Despite trading ties, political relations between Thailand and Myanmar have often been ambivalent. The first was a booming international hub and long-time U.S. ally, the second a pariah state with a moribund economy.

With Myanmar now tiptoeing towards reform, and Thailand marching towards authoritarianism, their fates seem to be converging. These days, leaders in both countries are talking the same language.

Myanmar’s generals have long spoken of a “roadmap” that would lead their nation to a “discipline-flourishing democracy.” In Thailand, which is under martial law, Prayuth talks of a “roadmap” to “Thai-style democracy.”

Both versions of democracy consist of systems where the military holds immense formal and behind-the-scenes powers.

Most members of Thailand’s handpicked national assembly are acting or retired soldiers or police. Similarly, a quarter of the seats in Myanmar’s parliament are reserved for serving members of the military.

Thailand’s military-drafted interim constitution grants junta members sweeping immunity from prosecution. Myanmar’s military has never atoned for its well-documented human rights abuses, which include opening fire on unarmed democracy protesters in 1988, killing or injuring thousands.

(Additional reporting by Aung Hla Tun in Yangon; Editing by Robert Birsel)

RANAI Indonesia (Reuters) – The word “sleepy” could have been invented for Ranai, the largest town in Indonesia’s remote and sparsely populated Natuna archipelago.

It has few cars and only two sets of traffic lights. The cloud-wreathed mountain looming over it resembles a slumbering volcano. Nearby beaches lie pristine and empty, waiting for tourists.

From Ranai, it takes an imaginative leap to see Natuna – a scattering of 157 mostly uninhabited islands off the northwest coast of Borneo – as a future flashpoint in the escalating dispute over ownership of the South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest waterways.

But that’s precisely what many people here fear.

They know Natuna is quite a prize. Its fish-rich waters are routinely plundered by foreign trawlers. Lying just inside its 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone is the East Natuna gas field, one of the world’s largest untapped reserves.

VIDEO: Indonesia enters South China Sea strife

And any quarrel over Natuna would also upset a delicate strategic balance, undermining Indonesia’s role as a self-appointed honest broker in the myriad territorial disputes between its Southeast Asian neighbours and regional giant China.

Jakarta’s foreign ministry insists there is no problem with China over the status of Natuna, but the Indonesian military has in recent months struck a more assertive tone.

In April, Indonesian armed forces chief Moeldoko accused China of including parts of Natuna within its so-called “Nine-Dash Line,” the vague boundary used on Chinese maps to lay claim to about 90 percent of the South China Sea.

EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

With maritime tensions rising between China and the Philippines and Vietnam, Moeldoko later vowed to send more troops to Natuna “to anticipate any instability in the South China Sea and serve as an early warning system for Indonesia”.

Officially, China and Indonesia don’t contest the sovereignty of the islands: both agree they are part of Indonesia’s Riau Province. Nor is Indonesia among the five countries – Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan and Brunei – challenging Beijing’s expansive claims in the South China Sea.

This has allowed Jakarta to play a neutral role and seek to mediate in an increasingly bitter and volatile dispute.

But Natuna’s bit-part in this regional drama reflects “growing concern within Indonesia about China’s actions within the Nine-Dash Line,” said Ian Storey, a security expert at the Institute of Southeast Asia Studies (ISEAS) in Singapore.

Rising maritime tensions with China have induced many Southeast Asian countries to seek closer strategic ties with the United States.

Since 2010 Indonesia has unsuccessfully sought clarification through the United Nations of the legal basis for the Nine-Dash Line. Indonesia’s foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, told Reuters in April that Indonesia had “inferred” from China that the line did not cross Indonesian territory.

Locals remain unconvinced. “We’re worried they’ll take over this territory,” Ilyas Sabli, Natuna’s regent, or district chief, told Reuters, referring to the Chinese. “That’s why it has become our first priority to protect this homeland.”

DEFENDING OIL AND GAS

About 80,000 people live on 27 of Natuna’s islands, mostly in Ranai and other places on the main island of Natuna Besar.

Ranai airbase was developed after Indonesia’s independence in 1949, and the town grew up around it. Today, a new civilian passenger terminal is being constructed in the hope of attracting more investors and tourists.

There was no evidence of an Indonesian military build-up. Two small naval ships lay idle at the end of a nearby pier.

Plans to upgrade the airbase were “not a new thing”, but part of a longer-term strategy to improve the airforce’s far-flung facilities, base commander Lieutenant Colonel Andri Gandhy told Reuters.

The plans include lengthening Ranai’s runway to handle larger aircraft. Work will start in 2015 or 2016, depending on the funding, said Gandhy.

Any military build-up would be hampered by budget restraints and fear of antagonising China, said Yohanes Sulaiman, a security analyst at the Indonesian National Defense University.

“The Indonesian military really wants to defend the islands, but with what? How can they fight China?” he said.

Neighbouring Malaysia has a more convincing blueprint to beef up its military presence in the South China Sea.

In October, Malaysia announced plans to build a navy base in Bintulu on Sarawak, the closest major town to the James Shoal, a submerged reef about 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of Malaysia’s Sarawak claimed by Malaysia, China and Taiwan. Chinese warships conducted exercises nearby in 2013 and 2014.

The base will host a new Marine Corps, modelled on, and possibly trained by, its U.S. counterpart. Without mentioning China, Malaysia’s defence minister said the aim was to protect Malaysia’s oil and gas reserves.

China has never protested against Indonesia’s search for oil and gas in Natuna waters, said Storey. The state-owned Pertamina is co-developing the East Natuna gas field with Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Total SA (TOTF.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) and PTT Exploration and Production (PTTEP.BK: Quote, Profile, Research).

FISHING WARS

As in Vietnam and the Philippines, it is Indonesia’s fishing fleet that feels China’s growing maritime presence most acutely.

Natuna fish stocks plummeted with the arrival of big-net trawlers from China, Vietnam, Thailand and Taiwan, said Rusli Suhardi, 40, a leader of the local fishermen’s cooperative.

“Before 2010, we could catch 100 kg (220 lbs) of fish a day. Now it takes three days to catch that amount,” he said.

A nearby bay is littered with the disintegrating wrecks of a dozen or more boats, mostly Vietnamese trawlers confiscated by the Indonesian authorities for fishing illegally. That no Chinese trawlers rot in this marine graveyard is testament to China’s growing maritime muscle.

In March 2013, armed Chinese vessels confronted a patrol boat from Indonesia’s maritime and fisheries ministry and demanded the release of Chinese fishermen who had just been apprehended in Natuna waters. Fearing for his safety, the captain of the Indonesian boat complied.

Storey, of ISEAS, said Indonesia has downplayed such incidents, not wanting them to overshadow relations with China.

Those relations are historic. Predating Ranai’s airbase is the ethnic Chinese community of Penagi, a ramshackle village built on stilts along a nearby pier. One of its oldest residents is Lim Po Eng, 78, a retired labourer, who said Penagi was founded by his grandfather and others fleeing chaos and poverty in China.

“We settled here and began to develop the place,” he said. The island was already inhabited by indigenous people, added Lim, “but they lived in the bush.”

Every morning, an Indonesian flag is raised over Penagi’s pier. Many locals say the Indonesian government cares little about the fate of Natuna, which lies closer to Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur than it does to Jakarta.

But this apparent indifference is bred partly by a desire to keep the status quo, said security analyst Sulaiman.

“The government knows there are no good options,” he said. “They can’t fight China, but if they don’t push their claims Indonesia will become a laughing stock.”